Chen awarded American Cancer Society Institutional Research Grant
Hong Chen, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and of radiation oncology in the School of Medicine, has received a one-year, $30,000 grant through the 2018 American Cancer Society - Institutional Research Grant (ACS-IRG)
Treatment of brain disorders — a major public health problem in the United States — is particularly challenging because invasive surgeries carry the risk of damaging healthy brain tissue and systemically administered drug therapies often fail because the blood-brain barrier (BBB) precludes the delivery of drugs in the blood circulation to the brain. With the funding, Chen will develop a novel drug-delivery technique, called focused ultrasound-mediated intranasal (FUSIN), to noninvasively circumvent the BBB for localized brain drug delivery without jeopardizing healthy regions of the brain and other normal organs.
The Washington University ACS-IRG annually awards up to four investigators these grants, which are designed to support junior faculty conducting cancer research pilot projects to obtain preliminary results that will enable them to compete successfully for national research grants.
In 2017, Amit Pathak, assistant professor of mechanical engineering & materials science, received the award.
